Nebraska – Page 4 – Birding New Jersey

September 12, 2017September 20, 2017

And It Begins

I’m in Denver with seven friends on a Linnaean Society field trip to the western plains. We’ll be traveling over the next week to the Wildcat Hills, the Pine Ridge, and the Black Hills in search of residents, migrants, and September vagrants. Can’t wait to see what these days bring!

We started this afternoon with a quick visit to Barr Lake, a few minutes from our hotel and usually just about the birdiest place around. Mid-afternoon on a ninety-plus-degree day was a bit less productive, but there were some notable highlights: great scope views of Cassin’s kingbird, an osprey dive-bombing a perched bald eagle, more than 400 American white pelicans, plenty of prairie dogs and fox squirrels. Some of us even got life birds — and that tally should continue to rise, especially after the promised cold front end of the week.

Stay tuned! Maybe tomorrow I’ll even remember to take some pictures. Or maybe not: sometimes you’re just having too much fun to let the camera interrupt.

March 13, 2017

Nebraska with VENT: Day Three

It was cold and windy and spitting snow when we arrived at Fort Kearny this morning to watch the moon set and the sandhill cranes rise. It’s still, 40 years on, one of the most moving experiences I’ve ever had in the outdoor world — rivaled only by the evening flight, which we witnessed tonight a half dozen miles downstream, tens of thousands of birds pouring in over our heads, shouting and gurgling and rattling and laughing.

In between we birded south of the Platte, from Kearney to almost Grand Island, marveling at cranes and arriving flocks of western meadowlarks out on the windy fields. Perhaps the most surprising bird of the day was hunkered down out of the elements on one of those fields, a gray blob that had me making one of those simultaneous screech-to-a-halt-and-make-a-U-turn maneuvers that mark us, sure as our binoculars, as birders.

I don’t know offhand how many migrant peregrine falcons I’ve ever seen in this state, but I’m guessing that a quick digital tally would likely involve neither of my feet.

Tomorrow: the cranes again, of course, and then a day of northing and westering into the most heartbreakingly beautiful landscape on the continent.

Stay tuned, and come with us next year.

March 11, 2017March 13, 2017

Nebraska With VENT: Day Two

The first full day of our tour ended with an hour and a half of the bird in the photo: this is the second year in a row that we’ve lucked into an early whooping crane, and only the fourth or fifth time, if rightly I remember, that we’ve managed to score this rare bird at all on this trip. Peak migration for the species on the Platte River in spring falls a good month from now, in the second week of April or so, and I assume that this individual — which we watched somewhere in Kearney County for a good hour and a half in the early evening — wintered inland in north Texas or somewhere nearby, where it fell in with a group of sandhill cranes and has adopted, I hope only temporarily, their seasonal rhythm.

The afternoon belonged to cranes, as it inevitably does on the central Platte in March. The “official” tally from a few days ago is 406,000 on this stretch of the river, and we found it easy to believe. Sandhill cranes were never out of sight or glorious, glorious sound once we reached easternmost Hall County, and though scanning the flocks on the ground and the air failed to produce a third gruid species, we did come across no fewer than three “cinnamon” sandhills, juveniles that for some reason skipped their molt in late summer of 2016 and retained their first plumage, stained brown with the mud of the tundra and now ragged and worn. I rarely see three such birds over the course of a season, and that many in a single day was a treat.

We started the day on the floodplain of the Missouri River, where a pair of pileated woodpeckers called and drummed and were all in all impressively incongruous. The skies were dull and the air cold, but red fox sparrows were in full song. The barred owl flying down the bottom of the bluffs landed out of sight to become a “leader-only” species, but maybe we’ll fix that on our return end of the week. Meanwhile, cranes!

March 11, 2017

Nebraska with VENT

We’re off to a fine start on this 2017 Victor Emanuel tour to Nebraska, with an afternoon of good birding and great company behind us.

The pretty little Franklin gull in the photo was a good find. The big flocks won’t be appearing for another three weeks or so, and I’d suspect that this bird was one of those that for whatever reason linger all season far north of the usual South American wintering grounds.

Lake Manawa produced a smattering of waterfowl, including half a dozen hooded mergansers and a nice gang of 35 or so canvasback among the couple of hundred lesser scaup. That we weren’t the only ones watching ducks this afternoon was made clear by the roost flight of bald eagles: at least 30 came out of the trees around the lake to seek safer perches on the Nebraska side of the river.

This tour is often very nice for mammals, and I hope we didn’t use up all our luck today. We started off with excellent looks at a black-morph eastern fox squirrel, one of the handsomest of the squirrels. Then at Lake Manawa we were serenaded in the late afternoon by a pack of coyotes, beautiful noise that never fails to send a shiver up the spine.

If there was a disappointment today, and I don’t think there really was, it was the woodcock show. The first started to buzz at 6:40 pm, but we had only fleeting views of three birds flying in early to display, and not a single good look at any of the birds up in the sky. It was getting chilly and the wind came up, so we kicked it in half an hour later. We’ll try again at the end of the tour — tomorrow it’s west to look for cranes, gray ones and white ones and maybe, fingers fervently crossed, one with a black and white neck….

June 17, 2016June 17, 2016

Happy Birthday, Fontenelle Forest

It’s one of my favorite places on earth. I learned to bird there, and I go back every spring — and whenever else I can — to catch up with the birds and the trees and the people I have been so fond of so long.

Fontenelle Forest was officially dedicated one hundred years ago this afternoon, when three thousand people gathered to celebrate this precious chunk of woodland just south of the largest city on the northern Great Plains.

The program began — perhaps inevitably — with a performance of Grieg’s “Morgenstimmung.” A certain Miss Hazel Silver then offered a piece less familiar to us (or at least to me) now, “The Hermit Thrush,” by F.S. Converse and Arvia MacKaye.

It seemed to be a voice of love/ That always had loved me… / My wandering love, lost yet forever heard.

Then came the afternoon’s prime attraction, a performance of Percy MacKaye’s “Sanctuary” with an epilogue specially composed for the occasion. MacKaye’s masque may have been short on dramatic tension, but its conservation message could not have been clearer — or more appropriate to the day.

A compact, then… that when we go/ Forth from these gracious trees/ Into the world, we go as witnesses/ Before the men who make our country’s laws,/ And by our witness show/ In burning words/ The meaning of these sylvan mysteries:/ Freedom and sanctuary for the birds!

Those words still burn, and Fontenelle Forest, if it remains in hands wise enough to privilege conservation of a scarce resource over entertainment and spectacle, will keep its sylvan mysteries for another century to come.